Blogs and Blogging – Page 47

April 26, 2012April 27, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair, by Sarah J. Sloat

Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hairSarah J. Sloat; dancing girl press 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
Regular readers of Via Negativa might recognize Sarah J. Sloat as the author of a blog I often link to, The Rain in My Purse, and another chapbook which I blogged about in 2009, In the Voice of a Minor Saint. I didn’t think this chapbook was quite as satisfying as that first one, at least in terms of the percentage of poems that blew me away, but it’s still pretty damn good. Her droll wit and sense of the absurd remain intact, and if this slim collection is any evidence, she seems to be getting more rather than less experimental with age, which is a good sign. She has a third chapbook due out shortly from Hyacinth Girl Press.

Sloat excels at poems in which a critical piece of information is missing, but the rest of it hangs together so well, it seems the better for it, like the Venus de Milo without her arms. Sometimes the execution seems a little too off-hand (heh), as in the title poem for this chapbook. But more typically it makes me chuckle or shiver with recognition, as in “My Money is on Fire,” a wry look at that sense of collective guilt inescapable for sensitive participants in a capitalist economy:

Every time I wear green or live
my secret life, no matter what
innocence I’m up to,
I’m sponsoring a disease
somewhere, making
souvenirs of the populace.

Wait, what secret life? you want to ask, but the poem goes in another direction. Perhaps Sloat refers to the kind of private visions at the heart of the wonderfully bleak “Toy Boat Toy Boat Toy Boat”:

My mug is rimmed with frost, an analgesic.
I peer over its horizon to see a toy boat
wobble on the Biergarten pond.

The mug’s a sun going down in my mouth. It alps
up like a snowglobe, mountainous with lipstick
ridges. Inside my father bows, shoveling snow.

He looks beyond me, turning to the window,
where my mother stands sucking the life
from an ice cube in her martini.

In “Do Tell,” a dream in which “doubts puckered like peas” throws the narrator off-balance the next morning.

Help me here.
How many mailboxes do you count lining the roadside?
And on whose head does the apple totter?

Things are clearly about to go very, very wrong here. A slightly less dire but still bracing take on domesticity, “Sworn to Observance,” reminded me of my own housecleaning. The dust under the radiator is “busy building a silt / equivalent of desert,” leading evidently to thoughts of the desert mystics in early Christianity, and/or John 8:6:

I sit nearby in my saint suit,
no intention of action.

With a finger sometimes
in the dust I draw a circle
to see how God enters into it.

Another poem, “On the Way to Meet My Daughter’s Teacher,” might or might not be about smoking. It begins:

I was about 15 minutes early
so I figured I’d kill myself a little bit.

Something more constructive
was out of the question.
But hell if I could handle
15 minutes of thinking.

About the whales.
About bedraggle.
About meeting my daughter’s teacher.

Or perhaps it is the cynicism that kills. One way or another, Sloat is like the anonymous artists in “Dictionary Illustrations,” who “don’t dawdle / among the obvious.” When she hums in the kitchen, it is to channel bees, and when she visits “Frankfurt Cemetery,” she remarks: “Not the past, but the present makes me sad.” We are all implicated, and our imagined refuges can’t save us:

Lately my house stands so still
at the back of my mind

I’m afraid of myself, here
at the bottom of the sky.
(“From the Back of My Mind”)

If you were ever tempted to think that the welter of literary micropresses on the scene these days exist solely to publish fairly minor talents, think again. Sarah J. Sloat is one example of a widely published poet with a sure voice and mature vision who has yet to get an ISBN of her own. Perhaps she is too busy leading a secret life.

April 20, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Jennifer Schlick visits Plummer’s Hollow

Naturalist, blogger and photographer Jennifer Scott Schlick visited Plummer’s Hollow earlier this week, and has just posted a short but stunning set of macro photos of some of our wildflowers. She was especially charmed by the rue anemone and fringed polygala (AKA gaywings), neither of which she’d encountered in her area of upstate New York (Jamestown and environs, just north of the northwest corner of Pennsylvania). It was also the first time she’s seen pink and yellow color variants of red trillium — one of the flowers included in our photo-poem collaboration last year. I’ve embedded her Flickr slideshow below, but if you can’t see it, here’s the link.

I had a hunch that Jennifer’s slideshow-talk “Confessions of a Reluctant Birder” would make a good presentation for our local Audubon chapter’s annual spring banquet, and I was right. Turns out she’s a highly entertaining, down-to-earth speaker. She does this sort of thing more or less for a living, along with banding birds, introducing high school kids to nature, mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to remove invasive plants from a 600-acre wetland, and yes, writing the occasional grant to support the Jamestown Audubon Center & Sanctuary, for which she serves as program director.

It was fun following Jennifer through our woods and introducing her to some of my favorite fellow inhabitants. Seeing the hollow through the eyes of a visitor is always a treat, but never more so than when the visitor has advanced training in looking at the natural world. And if you’re wondering whether Jennifer has blogged about the visit yet herself, the answer is of course.

March 27, 2012September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Wanted to review: poetry audiobooks

Can anyone recommend some good audiobooks or audio chapbooks of work by contemporary poets (or contemporary translations of poetry)? Once again this April I’m going to try to blog about a different collection of poetry every day, but this time I’d like to expand the definition of “book” a little bit. If I’m reading, I still prefer paper to a screen, but I am also interested in multimedia collections of poetry, so I want to make room for a few in the line-up. (I’ll be making a greater effort to read out loud the regular books I blog about, too. More than ever, my emphasis will be on slow reading.)

Incidentally, if you’d like to browse my poetry-book-a-day efforts from past years, they’re tagged Poetry Reading Month 2011 and Poetry Reading Month 2010.

March 5, 2012March 5, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Heard at AWP

“Electronic literature might also be called born-direct literature.”

“I love the messiness of digital space.”

“Blogs and online magazines with comments best embody the literary anarchy of the web — a literature without gatekeepers.”

“I’m sorry, I like gatekeepers. I don’t have the time to decide what to read.”

“A kind of hypertextual tunneling.”

“It’s emblematic of our societal discomfort with poetry that so many blurbs for poetry books use the word ‘unflinching.’ Actually, I think poets should flinch. We need to get better at flinching.”

“I practice a pedagogy of emergency.”

“The Seminary Bookstore at Hyde Park is the best bookstore in the world. I was jilted by Powell’s.”

“To give a poetry reading is to feel the phantom limb of the musician’s audience.”

“I make 40 to 50 thousand dollars a year traveling around playing the fiddle and reading poetry.”

“If you funk up a cliché, it becomes genius.”

“I was a whore at the poetry bordello.”

“She ripped the cigarette out of his mouth, broke it in half, and jabbed the lit end into his cheek.”

“Not many parks, but lots of feral space.”

“Just because you know how to write doesn’t mean you know how to read.”

With poet and Chicago native Susan Elbe

January 28, 2012 by Dave Bonta

One more new blog recommendation and a note about Odes to Tools

I can’t believe I forgot to mention the new blog that originally gave me the idea to write a post profiling new blogs yesterday! I am such a scatter-brain sometimes.

The blog is called A year of Mt. Tamalpais. Its description: “dreaming in the shadows of the Sleeping Maiden.”

Poet and blogger Maria Benet, author of Mapmaker of Absenses, began this so-far delightful and often moving record of Marin County, California’s “single most identifiable symbol” without any particularly lofty goals other than persistence:

Over the years and through many seasons, I’ve never tired of looking at the way the light and fog and rain work together to edit the mountain’s features, sometimes bringing out the depth of colors with a bold brush stroke and at other times rendering the solid ridges into gossamer. I’ve taken hundreds, if not thousands of pictures of Mt. Tam, mostly at random times of the day when the mountain seems to call out suddenly, demanding that I take notice and record the way a long, thin patch of fog slips fast over its peaks, or the way the narrow ray of winter sun slices through clouds to section the slopes with light, or the way, at the height of summer the ridges burst into a blaze with every conceivable shade of green.

So here is what I propose: a picture a day of the mountain that looms over our lives in this corner of the world.

Ideally, it would be best to take that shot at the same time and from the same place, every day. Knowing the way I work, this is not a realistic option. This is not just a question of my habits, but also of the eyes — of the vision becoming inhabited by a single perspective. With that approach I would be documenting a process over time, which is a fine project in itself, but not the one I want to launch.

A picture a day from the same place and same time would capture subtle changes, as well as those larger familiar ones wrought by the seasons. A robot would be the perfect candidate for that project. My project is about how the mountain gets itself seen in a daily life, in this case, mine. In other words, instead of my going to the mountain for data, I am going to let the mountain come to me in its power to make impressions.

So check it out. This is the sort of blogging project for which RSS feeds were invented. Sure, you could catch up once a week, but for maximum cumulative impact the photos, and Maria’s commentary, ought to be seen every day. If for some perverse reason you prefer the haphazard nature of Twitter to Google Reader, you can follow Maria there @alembic. And her main blog, small change, is worth following too, though it sounds as if it may be undergoing some not-so-small changes soon.

If price resistance, lack of physical space for new books or an extreme love of trees have prevented you from picking up a copy of my collection Odes to Tools yet, I have some good news: Beth at Phoenicia Publishing has just taken her first leap into e-book publishing, with my book as one of the first two to receive this treatment. The Kindle (MOBI) version is available through Amazon, but you can pick up either the MOBI or the EPUB directly from the publisher “to give a greater percentage of royalties to the author and greater support to independent publishing.” The price is $2.99 USD.

January 27, 2012September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Blogosphere blessings

Linda at The Task at Hand — one of my favorite destinations for creative nonfiction — wrote a post last Sunday titled “A Blogosphere Blessing,” in which she compared the welcoming links and comments of readers and fellow bloggers back when she started blogging to the house-warming parties of her youth in the American Midwest. With that in mind, I’d like to take a little time today to welcome some new (or newly returned) bloggers to the virtual neighborhood.

1. Ann E. Michael’s eponymous blog: “Poetry, nature, and speculative philosophical musings”

Pennsylvania poet Ann Michael began blogging back in September, so she’s not quite brand new, but she’s taken to it like the proverbial duck to water with thought-provoking, gracefully written posts on just the sort of topics likely to be of most interest to Via Negativa readers. A typical Ann E. Michael blog post might have her comparing Martin Buber, C. S. Lewis and Emily Dickinson, weighing the benefits of Lawn vs. meadow, and a doe, or musing on the appeal of the Christmas carol “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”:

I’m not a good singer myself, but I can sing this carol. The range works for most of us.

But that wasn’t what struck me this morning as the music surrounded me in my car en route to work. What I noticed—felt, in my marrow—is the sense of yearning in this carol. There is something particularly human in the minor-key longing for release, relief, joy, escape, liberty, union with a beloved other, desire that is both physical and spiritual, the yearning for renewal. Not hope but the desire, the longing for hope.

2. bint batutta: “crossing cultures”

From the About page:

My name is Ayesha, and I’m a translator and writer. I used to blog here. I was born in India and grew up in Britain, and I currently live in Bahrain.

Friends gave me the nickname Bint Battuta (after Ibn Battuta) because I used to travel a lot. These days my journeys take a different form. I love to read, and explore ideas. I’m particularly interested in history, and the spaces where cultures meet.

Since its rebirth on December 1, bint batutta has been a real cabinet of curiosities, with posts on the jalboot, the “Afghan” cameleers of Australia, the use of the Arabic script in Africa for languages other than Arabic, and more.

3. VidPoFilm: “the Poetics of Video and Film Poetry”

I love videopoetry and film-poetry, but I tend to have a hard time explaining why. My own site Moving Poems is therefore mainly a glorified links blog, an embedded video being a fancy kind of link. Brenda Clews goes much more in depth at VidPoFilm. And while my site is set up to focus on the poets, Brenda’s spotlight is square on the films/videos themselves. Here she is for instance on a film called Ground, by Ginnetta Correlli for a haiku series by Scottish artist (and film-poem maker) Alastair Cook:

This is a surreal filmpoem; it has a European art film feel to it. Like when watching an Almodóvar, forget logic, for a rational approach to understanding won’t reveal anything. As you seek to embrace the meaning of the film, you find mindfulness here like a Zen koan.

You can’t quite put it together. Rather, feel the deep angst the film produces. That’s where the film is unfolding in your consciousness as a message, a predicament, a riddler of the paradoxes of life.

VidPoFilm also has monthly group shows for online videopoets to share their favorite creations, theoretical commentary and more.

4. 如 (thus) 是: “¡Ay, quién podrá sanarme!”

Seon Joon is an American Buddhist nun in Korea who has been keeping a photoblog, from this shore, for several years now (and before that, blogged at a now-defunct site called Ditch the Raft). She just graduated from a four-year Buddhist seminary, which meant she’d have a little more time to blog — thus thus, which seems to be more a place for literary writings so far. Her “small stones” for the January river of stones writing challenge rank among the best I’ve seen:

Loud voices mask the night’s quiet. Where the lamplight ends the dark is present, pressing, patient, animal-like, before words.
(Jan. 3)

The sun slips away, like a face disappearing under dark velvet blankets. The temperature falls. I shiver, pull my hat down close.
(Jan. 9)

Winter rain, cold, hard, quiet, steady all day. Inside, behind curtains, I want the rain’s impassive clarity: only fall straight.
(Jan. 19)

Overnight, the world accumulates a white rime. 4 a.m. I float in the faint glow reflected over and over between snow and clouds.
(Jan. 25)

[updated to add] 5. A year of Mt. Tamalpais: “dreaming in the shadows of the Sleeping Maiden”
See my review here.

Please stop by these sites today or this weekend and join me in welcoming them to the blogosphere.

Via Negativa and its sister sites are also on the receiving end of some serious blessings from information technology architect, blogger and slow-reading expert John Miedema. John just released a major new version of his popular OpenBook WordPress plugin, which provides a convenient way for book reviewers to pull in a book-cover image, author, and other book data from Open Library (a site which I’ve used extensively during my April poetry-book-a-day marathons, due to its wealth of links and the ease with which one can add books not already in its database). Openbook 3.2 includes a number of new features, among them a donate button on the settings page of one’s WordPress dashboard. Many authors of free plugins include such buttons, as well they should. But John decided to have his button support something other than his own efforts.

If you click the new button on the settings page it will take you to a new page on the OpenBook support wiki, “Pay it Forward for Literacy.” On that page I recommend supporting the literary website, Via Negativa. Dave Bonta is a poet and editor from Pennsylvania. He maintains four excellent sites that I have followed for years. He is also a writer and editor of Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine. Countless volunteer hours have generated an enthusiastic following. You can support hosting and domain registration costs and keep these great literary sites going.

To say I’m honored by this wouldn’t begin to describe it. Flabbergasted is more like it. I mean, wow. As the son of an academic reference librarian (who continues to read and believe in my work — thanks, Dad!) I am especially pleased to have the support of such a progressive, cutting-edge thinker in the world of library science. I feel — what’s the word? — blessed.

January 25, 2012September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The eagle has landed on Reddit

Last weekend, I suddenly started getting a flurry of notifications from Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site which I use mainly to store the photos I post here. Out of the blue, people were favoriting a 2007 photo of a golden eagle with talons outspread.

It was part of an annotated set of photos of a golden eagle that had been trapped, fitted with a radio transmitter, and released on our property (see my blog post at the Plummer’s Hollow site and my mother’s much more thorough column).

I clicked through to the Flickr stats page, which I rarely remember to look at. Here’s what I saw:

Wherever people were coming from, they clearly weren’t taking the time to browse through the whole set. I scanned down to the list of referring sites and saw that the aggregator site Reddit was the culprit. Someone had posted the link to the pics section, and it had gotten enough up-votes to briefly land on the Reddit front page. This resulted in a highly amusing and somewhat revealing comment thread there, which I’ll get to in a minute. But first, for the uninitiated: what’s Reddit? A recent article at Slate should get you up to speed.

Reddit has become the most exciting place on the Web in the last few months, the center of an earnest yet jokey brand of cultural and political activism. … [W]hile Digg is all but dead today, Reddit not only survived the social media shift but has thrived in the age of tweets. Reddit’s traffic has exploded over the last few years—in 2011, visits doubled, and in December the site recorded 2 billion pageviews. It did so by turning inward, and by becoming more than just a place that amasses links to outside sites. On most days, the most popular posts on Reddit consist of stuff that Redditors themselves created or captured to share with other Redditors: image macros, animated gifs, pictures of cats, extremely geeky cartoons, weird Photoshop memes, and Facebook found art. There’s a lot more substantive stuff, too, including two discussion forums that I find consistently fascinating.
“The Great and Powerful Reddit: How the site went from a second-tier aggregator to the Web’s unstoppable force,” by Farhad Manjoo

So this is a loose-knit online “community” of mostly progressive and/or libertarian, politically active geeks. What would they make of the photo?

Some shared links to other photos and videos of eagles, and many focused on the hunting or killing potential of the talons. “I’m certain plenty of eagles are capable of killing humans,” said a user called wackyninja. “Considering a Golden Eagle will prey on small deer, I’d say that yes, they could kill a human,” AdmiralSkippy agreed. (Golden eagles have been known to take, or attempt to take, very large prey indeed.) “Here’s a picture of batman riding a shark while holding a lightsaber,” cheetahlip chimed in.

“That is a beautiful fucking bird,” opined bang_Noir. Some other Redditors got into a somewhat arcane discussion of what it might be like to have an eagle land on one’s arm. Bigcitycrows, apparently a falconer, wrote:

If you ever want to know what it feels like to have a bald eagle land on your arm, put on the thickest glove you can find, then gently rest your car door closed on your forearm through the glove. Again SLOWLY and lightly push the door. It feels weird and far-off, because it’s through the padding, but a painful increase in pressure. If you want to know what it feels like to have a golden eagle lose her footing and hold on for dear life trying to regain it, swing the door closed.

A number of other comments amused me for one reason or another:

“That Owl, Looks surprisingly happy.” Reply: “Which is why that picture is so goddamned creepy.”

“I’m still impressed they can catch prey so well. I never had any luck with those talon thingys at the arcade.”

“That is such a marvellous bird. The head is pure design win.”

“Polly want a small furry mammal?”

“You’re on the front page way more often than should be possible.”

“Talons be with you.”

“I really am surprised that all other birds just haven’t committed suicide knowing they might be compared to an eagle at some point. All kinds of eagles are friggin’ monsters!”

“So long as they don’t figure out how to use door handles, we’re safe.”

“And here I was, just scared of bears. (looks up)”

“What a cutie :)”

“I guess I’ve never seen an up-close image of an eagle or something because I just stared at this shit for 20 minutes.”

“Damn nature! You scary!”

“Where is your god now?”

“That’s some straight up gangster shit”

“I handled birds of prey like this once for high school conservation club. Birds are incredibly intimidating at first, but once they trust you, they’re all like, ‘Yo.'”

“I saw Golden Eagle and instantly thought of Angry Birds”

Fear and awe mingled readily with humor, which is as it should be, I think. I was a little disappointed by how many people seem to see the world exclusively through the lens of Hollywood and video games, but on the other hand there was no shortage of commenters who clearly knew something about birds, dinosaurs, or both. One definitely gets the impression of overlap between nature-nerdism and general geekery.

I’m grateful to the Redditors for linking to the photo (more than once, apparently) and providing such amusing commentary. But as a blogger, it’s not the kind of audience I’m looking for. Judging from the stats, a vanishingly small percentage of viewers took the time to look at any of the other photos in the set. None of them left comments there — if they had anything to say, in the usual social-media pattern they went back to where they found the link and commented there.

Still, it’s kind of nice to know that that many people can still be moved by the site of a wild creature. I’d like to think it stirs something primal in the human breast.

January 14, 2012January 14, 2012 by Dave Bonta

First “Words on the Street” book now available in print and electronic forms!

It’s been a long time in coming, but I’m very happy to announce that a print and e-book collection of 109 satirical cartoons featuring Via Negativa’s original, imaginary guest-blogger Diogenes is now available from that famous London publishing powerhouse, Bauble Tree Books. (If you caught my announcement at the beginning of December and are wondering why we weren’t able to get it out before Christmas, here are all the gory details.)

Visit the Bauble Tree page for the book. Or save a click and go directly to the source(s):

Print edition at Lulu (£9.99 — $15.30 at current exchange rate)
Paperback, 224 pages

EPUB edition at Lulu (£0.99 — $1.52)
For Nook, iPad, iPhone, etc.

Kindle edition at Amazon.com ($2.99)

Kindle edition at Amazon UK (£2.00)

Amazon’s French site (I’m an “auteur”!), German site, Spanish site, and Italian site (€2.68)

All of the cartoons have been re-done from what I originally published here (which were small GIF files, many of them long since vanished into the ether, presumably due to server failure or retirement by the free image-hosting service I used). A significant number of Diogenes’ signs were re-written, and a couple are brand-new.

Also adding value to the book is a short preface by my friend Kaspalita, a UK-based Pureland Buddhist priest and blogger. Now you may be wondering, “Why a Buddhist? Why would you not ask a graphic artist to introduce a book of graphic ‘art’?” But Words on the Street, as an inaction comic, is all about sitting, and who knows more about sitting than a Buddhist priest? We could argue about the difference between mindful repetition of the nembutsu and humorous repetition of the same drawing with different words, but never mind. Here’s some of what Kaspa said:

Anne Bogart described great art as something that stops you in your tracks and won’t let you move beyond it. Dave Bonta’s few words provoke a similar arrest. His placards draw forth a wry smile and, as good satire should, leads us into a critique of the many questionable aspects of our society.

Bonta’s words are given another layer of meaning by their fixed context, the unchanging homeless character whose placard they grace. “Friend Me” takes on a completely different significance seen here, as opposed to on one’s favorite social networking site.

Each page I flick to raises a smile and then asks me to come back to it and think, and then to think again. In this book Dave moves towards cementing his reputation as satirist and as an important contemporary gadfly.

Hear that? “An important contemporary gadfly”! If anyone not as fully trustworthy as an ordained priest said that, I’ll bet you’d be inclined to raise an eyebrow, wouldn’t you?

Needless to say, reviews would be very welcome. I’m told some review copies of the digital version may be available — contact the publisher.

Keep in mind that all of my royalities from the sale of this book and ebook will go toward supporting the Via Negativa blog network, including the production (and hopefully much more reliable hosting!) of brand new Words on the Street cartoons. So think of it as a sponsorship for something you’d like to see continue. (Well, of course, you can also think of it as a fabulous Valentine’s Day gift if you like.)

Also in that vein, if you like Words in the Street and/or want to support Via Negativa, don’t forget to visit my storefront at CafePress. Send me photos or videos of Via Negativa t-shirts, mugs, etc. “in the wild” and I’ll be happy to post them with a link back to your blog, if you have one. (No need to include your face if you’re shy.) Ditto for photos of the book being read in unlikely places.

In fact, let me conclude this post with some shots of Cynthia Cox modeling a t-shirt with my personal favorite Words on the Street cartoon. Cynthia is an award-winning poet based in the Houston, Texas area whose work I first came to know years ago at a blog called the twitching line; she now shares poems, videos and other fun and wonderful things at mareymercy. Herewith her riffs on “Clichéd — please help” (click to embiggen):

December 30, 2011September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Via Negativa 2011: A year of great gifts

2011 was an extraordinary year for me and for this blog. This year more than any other since I started blogging, I really felt the love from readers, fellow bloggers, and fellow poets and artists whose kindness and generosity opened new doors and helped me close others.

First and most obviously, I guess, 2011 was the year that Luisa Igloria clearly became Via Negativa’s most regular guest blogger — more like a co-author, really — with her extraordinary and so far unbroken string of daily poems in response to updates at VN’s sister blog The Morning Porch. This represented a major shift for a site that had always been pretty closely identified with its main author — one that perhaps a few long-time readers found disconcerting. But for me, Luisa’s contributions are a tremendous gift and represent a way forward, a broadening of focus for the site in a time of dwindling public interest in anything that forces people to leave the amniotic embrace of Facebook or Twitter, and a reminder to myself not to grow complacent, to keep challenging myself creatively.

Another collaboration beginning just after the New Year resulted in some of my strongest poems to date: a series of spring wildflower poems in response to macro photos by blogger and naturalist Jennifer Schlick. This proposal came completely out of the blue, and again I suppose owes as much to The Morning Porch as to Via Negativa, since I believe it was her regular reading of the former than led Jennifer to think I might be the one for the job. The poems were incorporated into placards at an exhibition of Jennifer’s photographs in Jamestown, New York, which I wasn’t able to attend due to a conflict with another reading and exhibition where my poems were also featured (see below). Despite the costs and difficulty of printing a full-color book, I hope we’re able to make the collection available this year (ideally in time for wildflower season). Regardless, I remain deeply grateful to Jennifer for suggesting the collaboration.

For the second year in a row, I spent April reading and reviewing a poetry book a day, and was joined by another blogger and poet, Kristin Berkey-Abbott, in reading four of those books and interviewing the authors by phone for the podcast. Poets were generous in donating their books for the effort, which is frankly one of the main reasons I do it. (And it’s not too early to send books or chapbooks for next April.)

In May, I travelled abroad for the first time in many years, thanks to the generosity of an anonymous benefactor who bought my plane ticket, and thanks to blogging in general: the occasion was a group poetry reading in Wales for the release of The Book of Ystwyth: Six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, which includes my Temptations of Solitude poems first published here in 2009. Highlights of that trip included getting to meet Clive Hicks-Jenkins and see his 60th birthday retrospective exhibition, and hanging out with other blogger-friends in Wales, Birmingham and London: Kaspalita Thompson and Fiona Robyn, Will Buckingham, Jean Morris, Dick Jones, Natalie d’Arbeloff, and the enigmatic Hg and RR. And naturally the trip spawned plenty of new blog posts as well, including videos, podcast episodes, and a whole series of poems sparked by a visit to a Victorian cemetery.

Speaking of series, I was flabbergasted to have a manuscript of my banjo poems, which I continued to blog sporadically this year, selected for publication by my favorite poetry chapbook publisher, Seven Kitchens Press, in their Keystone Chapbook series. (Here’s the announcement.) This was the first time I’d entered a poetry manuscript contest since 1999, and here’s the fun part: the fellow who won the last contest I entered, Sascha Feinstein, was the judge who selected Breakdown: Banjo Poems.

My rudimentary filmmaking skills became slightly less rudimentary this year, I think, as I continued to make videopoems to share here. Unlike last year, though, my focus was more on envideoing other people’s poems, helped along by Nic S.‘s generosity with the audio recordings she has created for several online projects, most notably Whale Sound and Pizzicati of Hosanna.

The big downer of the year, I guess, was the deterioration of Via Negativa’s web hosting situation, which led to a significant decline in page views (though not necessarily in actual readership). My web account was suspended six times for excessive CPU usage, and while the geeks at my old web host were friendly enough, they weren’t interested in helping me trouble-shoot. We also saw frequent downtime that had nothing to do with me; I think it was a typical case of a cheap shared web host trying to pack too many sites onto too few servers, and penalizing the rare sites that actually get some traffic. I meanwhile didn’t understand that the constant barrage of spam comments coming into the site was probably a big part of why it was using so much CPU, even though 99% of those comments went straight into the trash. And I made the all-too-common mistake of assuming that because a web hosting company touts “unlimited” subdomains and add-ons, it was O.K. to take that literally and piggy-back all my other sites onto Via Negativa. Bad idea.

They finally lost patience and terminated my account in mid-October, which was not altogether a bad thing, since it forced me to find better hosts and divide my sites up between them in a more intelligent fashion. I’ve now closed comments on all posts older than a month (which I hated to do), and so far, resource usage at the new host seems fine. I also ported all my content to a brand-new database rather than re-installing the old one, so that probably helped a lot too.

My sites are now scattered across three different web hosts, more than doubling my blog-related expenditures. So for the first time I set up a Via Negativa store, featuring mainly t-shirts and mugs with old Words on the Street cartoons, and I also began to beg for money with a Donate button in the sidebar. Thanks to several generous donations from readers, plus a well-compensated poetry reading at Penn State Altoona in October, I’ve been able to cover expenses for this year. Another reader donated a very large external hard drive, which should be a big help with storing and retrieving video files especially.

Long-term, I suppose I will have to gird my loins and do some sort of low-key annual fund-raising drive, because I suspect that the mere presence of a donate button won’t be enough. Another project that might raise a little bit of money, but is more just a fun thing that I should’ve done years ago: a Words on the Street anthology, which should be available in paper, ePub and Kindle form in another week or two (we ran into some unexpected problems with bleed-through on the paper, so weren’t able to release it in time for Christmas). Given my new-found willingness to beg, it kind of makes sense to bring back my fictional, urban alter-ego, Diogenes the bum.

I blog for love and not for money, and that’s unlikely ever to change. But the gift economy is a wondrous thing. As Ecclesiastes put it: “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you shall find it after many days.” (Mmm, soggy bread!) This year I really learned the truth of that saying. Thanks to everyone who links, comments, or simply reads.

If you’d like the re-acquaint yourself with some of the best posts of the year, check out the Greatest Hits category, which may be accessed any time from the navigation bar under the header. Luisa and I have just brought it up to date with our personal favorites from the past twelve months. For a complete, clickable table of contents to all the posts from the past year, visit the Archives page. And if you’d like to surf around and sample some of the best posts from Via Negativa’s entire eight years of existence, click the Random link.

December 17, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Via Negativa snapshot

Age of blog: 8 years
Total number of posts: 3,528
Total number of archive pages @ 10 posts/page: 353
Comments (since April 1, 2006): 19,051
Categories: 40
Category with the most posts: Poems & poem-like things (1,306)
Tags: 652
Series: 25
Active plugins: 15
Average page views per month: 15,000
Busiest day: October 6, 2011 (2,919 views)
Most popular post: Tree stands (15,326 views)

Total word count: 1,364,021
Average words per post: 386
Wordiest post: Festival of the Trees 1 (5,113 words)
Wordiest post that didn’t include a ton of quotes: Monsters of God (4,624 words)
Wordiest month: April 2004 (40,945 words)
Least wordy month: September 2009 (3,186 words)
Dave’s total word count: 1,288,732
Dave’s average words per post: 409
Luisa’s total word count: 55,865
Luisa’s average words per post: 152

Number of times Via Negativa has been hacked: 2
Number of times Via Negativa has moved to a new web host: 3
Via Negativa is older than: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, this mountain in Iceland, my niece Elanor, and my relationships with more than a dozen dear friends, scores of great writers and countless other interesting folks whom I’ve met through blogging.

Thanks to the WP Word Count plugin, by Brian J. Link, for all the word-count statistics.